SPOTLIGHT ON SUGAWARA BUNTA AND FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN JAPAN

 

 

When I first went to Japan in the 1980s, a family I stayed with in Gunma prefecture had a lively dog that they called Bunta or Bunchan for short. I saw told that he was named after the actor Sugawara Bunta. This actor was of the old school and, like Takukura Ken, starred in lots of yakuza movies. Between 1975 - 1979 he also made a number of trucker movies in the Torakku Yaro series. In more recent years, he has worked as a voice actor for the Ghibli studios (playing Kamaji in Spirited Away) and even starred with Shinohara Tomoe in the TV drama series Sensei Shirani No. More recently he was the inspiration for the character Admiral Akainu in the 2012 One Piece movie 'Z'.

 

I had the good fortune on one trip back to Japan of finding a CD of the soundtracks to a number of the Torakku Yaro films... Not that my wife sharted my enthusiasm. To her, it probably reeks of enka or some other form of sake induced nostalgia for the 'good old days'. In my mind the Torakku Yaro films are up there with some of my other favourites like Bee Bop High School and the Wolf and Cub series.

Finally, of great interest to me (again), was the appearance of Sugawara Bunta on the NHK news in November 2013. The Abe government is apparently considering reforms that aims to restrict freedom of speech. Sugawara Bunta was interviewed after attending some kind of a protest meeting and he said that given the lack of freedom of speech under the occupation after the war he found it incomprehensible that the Japanese government now considered introducing these same laws on themselves as a democracy.